GUWAHATI: The upcoming elections in three states of the Northeast will be a battle for survival for the Congress which once ruled the entire region but has now gotten reduced to a shadow of its glorious past. The Congress’ slide in the Northeast began after the BJP’s emergence as a powerhouse in 2014.
Simultaneous elections in the 60-member Assemblies of Nagaland, Meghalaya and Tripura are expected in February.
As it appears now, the Congress is not in the race to power in any of these states. It lacks leaders after many of them embraced the ruling party and other parties over a period of time.
The Congress does not have a single MLA in Nagaland, just one in Tripura and five in Meghalaya.
However, the five in Meghalaya were suspended earlier this year by the party’s central leadership for cosying up to the Conrad K Sangma government.
The Congress had emerged as the single largest party in the 2018 Meghalaya Assembly elections but the National People’s Party (NPP)-led motley alliance formed the government.
In November last year, 12 of 17 Congress MLAs in Meghalaya, led by former Chief Minister Mukul Sangma, jumped ship to wear Trinamool Congress (TMC) colours. Their desertion relegated the grand old party to a more minor party and made the Mamata Banerjee-led TMC the state’s principal Opposition party overnight. TMC had no base in the state prior to that.
Shillong MP H Pala is now Congress’s lone prominent face in the Christian-majority state. The Congress will not, perhaps, have a single MLA by the time it goes to elections as the five suspended legislators have more or less ditched the party and are likely to contest the polls on the tickets of other political parties.
In Tripura, Sudip Roy Barman is the Congress’ only MLA. He had won the last election on the BJP’s ticket and was inducted into the ministry but he resigned from the Assembly and the party in February this year after falling out with the then-Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb. Later, he won a by-election, necessitated by his resignation.
The Congress had failed to win a single seat in the 2018 Tripura elections which the BJP swept, decimating the Left.
The Congress had also drawn a blank in the Nagaland elections of 2018. The party, which had won many elections under former Chief Minister SC Jamir, is now virtually lost in the state which is ruled by a coalition of BJP, Nationalist Democratic Progressive Party, and Naga People’s Front. All MLAs in the state are from these three parties.
The elections in the three states are around the corner but not many people are talking about the Congress.
Party leaders, however, try to put up a brave face. “So what if we have one MLA? Atal Bihari Vajpayee had just two MPs but he went on to become the Prime Minister,” Tripura Congress chief Birajit Sinha told this newspaper. “There is a lot going on in Tripura. People will vote us to power,” he said confidently, just days after seven Congress leaders, led by former state chief Pijush Kanti Biswas, joined the TMC in Tripura.
The Congress in Nagaland sounded equally optimistic. “The Congress is the only alternative and people will vote for it. Not only has the Naga political issue remained unresolved, but the state, under the present government, is also facing bifurcation,” state Congress president K Therie said referring to the demand of an influential tribal organization for the creation of “Frontier Nagaland” state in eastern Nagaland.